Cast Aside Infrastructure Management and Focus on Your Core Competencies with DataBank’s Proactive Enterprise Services

TL;DR: DataBank, founded in 2005, is on a mission to leverage its enterprise-class managed datacenter products and services to help customers manage risk and improve performance while focusing on their business objectives. The company provides its datacenter, cloud, and connectivity services via top-notch facilities, a robust storage network, and a multihomed internet access hub. With plans for expansion into additional markets, DataBank is poised to help even more customers trade infrastructure worries for proactively managed services.

It’s no secret that the IT market has evolved in step with changing customer needs during the past decade.

In terms of infrastructure, a growing number of enterprises must grapple with increasingly hybrid workloads (think colocation, public cloud, and private cloud environments). Managing the support of multiple vendors in this disconnected landscape is a nightmarish prospect, making the job of an IT admin considerably more difficult and time-consuming.

The folks at DataBank know this and have spent the past 15 years providing proactive infrastructure management services in step with a rapidly changing industry.

“In terms of the hybrid cloud journey, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for every customer,” said Vlad Friedman, CTO at DataBank. “It’s the amalgamation of all these different platforms — and as you start to put them together, they become incredibly powerful but complex.”

Behind the scenes, DataBank’s team of professionals combine such networks into cohesive solutions while ensuring they are secure, monitored, backed up, and available. This allows the customer to focus on essential business objectives rather than infrastructure concerns.

DataBank leverages top-notch facilities, a robust national network, scalable cloud infrastructure, and a multihomed secure internet access hub to deliver its datacenter, cloud, and connectivity services to enterprises. Between its infrastructure, frameworks, and internal talent, the company strives to provide flexible, customer-centric solutions united seamlessly via the company’s advanced support portal.

As for the future, DataBank is working to reach additional markets while enhancing the managed cloud, internet, and compliance solutions that alleviate infrastructure burdens for customers across the nation.

DataBank, founded in 2005 to address market demand for personalized colocation solutions, is headquartered in the former Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, which was converted into a datacenter six years prior.

From 2014 through 2018, the company experienced rapid growth due in part to an acquisition strategy that kicked off with the purchase of Arsalon Technologies. The move brought two additional datacenters, an extensive technical team, and a broad set of robust cloud and managed services into the fold.

In 2016, the company acquired Edge Hosting, a managed services provider founded in 1998 by Vlad himself.

“Edge Hosting was launched to focus on mission-critical managed services and application workloads that needed to be highly compliant, could never go down, and remain secure,” Vlad told us. “Today, Edge has enhanced the managed services arm of DataBank with a similar focus but on a much larger scale.”

In 2017, DataBank acquired three facilities from C7 Datacenters as well as two facilities in Cleveland and Pittsburgh from 365 Datacenters. Finally, through its most recent acquisition of LightBound in 2018, the company added two datacenters and a customer base in the Midwest market to the mix.

By 2018, the company had also built several datacenters and hired a number of key executives, including CEO Raul Martynek, who leads the company to this day.

“Ultimately, what we’ve done is built a platform to enable hybrid IT solutions for enterprise businesses consuming a blend of our colocation environments, private cloud offerings, storage and security solutions, and compliance platforms,” Raul said. “The idea is to create a seamless customer experience.”

Between several acquisitions and buildouts, DataBank now operates 20 datacenters across the country, including locations in Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Salt Lake City.

“A lot of our customers are very specific regarding where they want their workload, which proves that geography is still important,” Raul said. “Because of our scale, all our facilities are connected with Metro dark fiber and a long haul, high-capacity Ethernet circuit.”

Raul told us that the company has invested heavily in its infrastructure to support demand for high-performance computing platforms used for data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

DataBank’s ultimate goal, of course, is to use its managed services to free customs from the burden of focusing on infrastructure. The company has also invested in security and compliance capabilities to satisfy the needs of its customer base.

“The world is getting increasingly complex in terms of privacy and compliance frameworks, and we think that’s one area where we can add a lot of value,” Raul said. “We have a lot of customers who are working with state and local agencies, and we’re able to take on all of the compliance and security concerns so they can focus on building their applications.”

At DataBank, compliance and security aren’t a matter of checking off a few boxes — which Raul said is very common in the IT industry.

“It really is about the meaningful work that has to get done every day to make sure that these systems stay secure, and then actually being a service provider that can participate in the customer’s audit process,” he said. “So it lessens their burden because they know they have a team with strong processes in place standing behind them, which makes the audit process easier.”

In addition to the ability to operate with agility, peace of mind through security and compliance capabilities, and high uptime rates, DataBank’s value proposition includes a remarkably proactive approach to managed services.

In fact, the company aims to open 70% of the support tickets that occur for each environment by themselves.

“Reaching that key performance indicator (KPI) means we’re proactive rather than reactive, we’re predictive, and we’re doing capacity planning to avoid rather than react,” Vlad said. “Our technology proactively intercepts attacks launched against our customers’ platforms faster than people ever could.”

DataBank holds itself to high standards in more ways than one. Faced with an ever-shifting needs landscape, the company also turns to customer feedback and the latest market trends to ensure the best possible user experience.

“Several times a week, our engineering teams have calls with our sales teams so we can discuss opportunities, what we hear in the marketplace, and what things aren’t working so we can adjust and adapt,” Vlad said. “It’s very often that customers give us the best insight.”

Vlad told us it’s also crucial to keep the talent at DataBank trained on the newest technologies used to achieve successful digital transformations. This allows them to leverage a prescriptive strategy of sorts.

“Our team engineers a solution with multiple elements — maybe colocation managed by their team and private cloud elements managed by our team aligned with any number of compliance standards,” he said. “It’s the process of putting it together, rather than just trying to focus on cores and gigs and control panels, that makes us a bit different.”

DataBank has tripled the size of the company in the last three years and serves nine strategic markets. The company is also well-funded, with backing from blue-chip investors, Digital Bridge, TIAA, and Allstate.

“We’re fortunate to have very progressive long-term investors so we can put significant capital toward building world-class facilities and expansion into new markets,” Raul said.

Beyond those goals, Vlad said DataBank is working to create true workload portability across all of its platforms.

“We are taking all of our systems, all of our clouds across all of our geographies, and creating tools that’ll allow live migrations of workloads while still being able to leverage all of our existing tooling,” he said.

In addition to extending VMware into the public cloud, the company is exploring how to integrate AWS Outposts and Azure Stack into on-prem colocation environments.

“Portability and flexibility will be key elements in our future success,” Vlad said.